Our Rhinoceros Year

In the play called Rhinoceros by the Romanian dramatist Eugene Ionesco, two men are sitting in a cafe in a small French town when the improbable news arrives that a rhinoceros was seen in town. Soon the two men look out the window to see several rhinoceroses rampaging through the streets. They are surprised at this development, of course ... and then one of the two men starts transforming into a rhinoceros as well.

Eugene Ionesco had grown up in Romania, one of several Eastern European nations shattered by the first World War that eagerly allied with Hitler for the second. Ionesco's Rhinoceros is about Romania, of course — about decent citizens of a modern society who transform into witless, delirious fascists, and about one decent citizen, the protaganist Berenger, who does not catch the disease but cannot cure those who do.

Rhinoceros presents a blunt metaphor, but Ionesco has also delivered subtler messages about the dangerously thin veneer of civil society during his long career as a Romanian absurdist playwright in French exile. His earlier play The Bald Soprano offers a polite dinner party in which a few friends and romantic partners discover that language has ceased to be a connective tissue between them. They all know each other, and yet they suddenly find themselves unable to discern their relationships and even their own identities. The more they try to talk, the more they teeter towards complete estrangement.

The characters in The Bald Soprano don't descend into fascism, though they experience the fear and alienation that underlies every breakdown of civil society. As in Rhinoceros, their condition appears to be a fatal one. The Bald Soprano found a receptive audience in Paris five years after the liberation from Nazi rule, though it took Ionesco nine more years to construct the hard-edged exorcism that was Rhinoceros, his most famous work.

Eugene Ionesco was known as an absurdist, and his work resonates well with that of other absurdists. His Rhinoceros is a spin on Kafka's Metamorphosis, though in Kafka's story the protagonist's horror was to find himself transformed. In Ionesco's world, to transform is to conform. It is Ionesco's protagonist's horror to not transform while everyone else does.

Ionesco's work also resonates with the later absurdism of Harold Pinter, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. How do we protect ourselves when our means of communication are hacked? How do we even survive? Like the airborne toxic event of DeLillo's White Noise, the degredation that descends over a fine civilization in Rhinoceros is a dumb and gigantic thing, bigger than all of us, leaving us helpless to resist. Though we must resist, and we do.

One reason to pay attention to Rhinoceros in 2016 is that the great comic actor Gene Wilder, who died in August, starred in a little-known 1974 film version of the play. It may seem odd that this unique movie is not well-known, especially since it reunites Gene Wilder with the great Zero Mostel, with whom he starred in the brilliant original Mel Brooks movie The Producers.

If you watch the Gene Wilder/Zero Mostel Rhinoceros you will quickly understand why it is not a well-known movie: it's just not very good, and is a chore to sit through. The great chemistry between Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel that made The Producers so wonderful completely falls apart here. Zero Mostel had played the original "Jean the rhinoceros" in a hit Broadway production of Ionesco's play years before. The burly actor's bombastic interpretation of a man becoming a jungle beast must have worked very well on a theater stage. But his loud performance comes off shrill and grotesque in Hollywood close-up, while Gene Wilder's character shrinks away to nothing. The two actors were comic equals in The Producers, but the role of Berenger (played by Eli Wallach in the earlier Broadway play) is a pure straight man role. Wilder does not make himself believable as an introspective wastrel with a drinking problem, and finds no center from which his character can radiate a personality. Gene Wilder should never be cast in a straight man role; it suffocates his performance here.

This unfortunate Rhinoceros was directed by Tom O'Horgan, one of the masterminds behind the superb 1968 hit Broadway musical Hair, and it even includes original musical numbers by Hair's talented composer Galt MacDermot. So much talent for one bad movie! O'Horgan and McDermot seem to both want to bring a 1960s/1970s hip and freewheeling "summer of love" sensibility to Ionesco's decidedly 1950s-ish play, and the arch combination just doesn't work at all, neither as comedy nor tragedy.

Still, any Rhinoceros is worth looking at, and there are worthwhile moments in this film, like the camera angle that places 1974's infamous period villain President Nixon between Mostel and Wilder as they yell at each other. This image carries extra weight today. We survey our landscape at the end of 2016 — the year that took Gene Wilder and so many other people we love, the year that left us with a buffoonish, hate-spewing and blatantly corrupt president-elect who makes Richard Nixon seem honest by comparison.

Eugene Ionesco's fable is apparently something the whole world can relate to. Perhaps the play is more famous around the world than it is in my own country. But 2016 has been our rhinoceros year, here in the USA. And absurdism has really never gone out of style, has it?

4 Responses to "Our Rhinoceros Year"

by michael.norris on Saturday, December 31, 2016 10:42 am

The Bald Soprano, known as the "Cantartrice Chauve" in French, has been playing continuously at the Théàtre de La Huchette in Paris since 1957. Yes, the hunger for absurdist drama is constant and spans many generations. Pick up a copy of Rhinoceros and read it - it's not very long - and you will immediately see a striking reflection of our times.

---"How do we protect ourselves when our means of communication are hacked?"
That's a key question, when the buzz-word lexicon gets built up so high and teetering, and everyone babbles in political code. Gingrich and the Neo-Corporatists (along with their army of Limbaugh-bobble-headed henchmen) really ran with this funny business starting in the last half of the '80s.

Part of me wants to hope that this recent farce of an election represents a more general rejection of this sort of forked-tongue "politicking" (the "Outsider" coming in to "clean up" DC, a la Ross Perot 24 years ago), but given Mr. T's speech and the sketchy company he keeps, it's hard to really believe this.

Though I've never seen it performed, I found it an amusing read (not ha-ha funny, but as you stated in an absurd way). I have an old copy on one of my bookshelves and I am tempted to reread it over the weekend. Thanks for the article, Marc.

Suspicion, it turns out, is even more dangerous than hatred. Different ethnic groups can hate each other and still coexist in peace for centuries. It's only when they become suspicious of each other that genocides and atrocities occur.

Because I love literature, I bristle when ever I hear Russia described as my country's enemy. Certainly Vladimir Putin is our enemy, because he is a tyrant who murders journalists, and certainly Donald Trump is our enemy, because Vladimir Putin is his role model. But the land that gave us some of the greatest and most politically perceptive fiction of modern times can never be our enemy.

This is the gift of hate -- and hate is, indeed, the gift that keeps on giving. We've since handed it on to other unwilling and undeserving recipients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now they suffer with the gift too. It's still with us today, and we see it everywhere. Look at the self-hatred so many Americans still feel, ten years after the horrifying day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. This knot of rage, this tar baby, this glutinous mass -- it is still inside us, whether we like it or not ...

We have become as superstitious about genocide as cave dwellers must have been about tornadoes and hurricanes. We seem it as a rare force of nature, bigger and stronger than us. We hope the monster never comes our way. If it ever does we plan to hide.

We tend to think about genocide in personal terms, but the strategic rationale for genocide is never based on emotion -- not prejudice, not hatred, not sexual aggression, not personal greed, not religious belief -- but rather always on the cold calculus of total war.

Suspicion, it turns out, is even more dangerous than hatred. Different ethnic groups can hate each other and still coexist in peace for centuries. It's only when they become suspicious of each other that genocides and atrocities occur.

Because I love literature, I bristle when ever I hear Russia described as my country's enemy. Certainly Vladimir Putin is our enemy, because he is a tyrant who murders journalists, and certainly Donald Trump is our enemy, because Vladimir Putin is his role model. But the land that gave us some of the greatest and most politically perceptive fiction of modern times can never be our enemy.

This is the gift of hate -- and hate is, indeed, the gift that keeps on giving. We've since handed it on to other unwilling and undeserving recipients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now they suffer with the gift too. It's still with us today, and we see it everywhere. Look at the self-hatred so many Americans still feel, ten years after the horrifying day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. This knot of rage, this tar baby, this glutinous mass -- it is still inside us, whether we like it or not ...

We have become as superstitious about genocide as cave dwellers must have been about tornadoes and hurricanes. We seem it as a rare force of nature, bigger and stronger than us. We hope the monster never comes our way. If it ever does we plan to hide.

We tend to think about genocide in personal terms, but the strategic rationale for genocide is never based on emotion -- not prejudice, not hatred, not sexual aggression, not personal greed, not religious belief -- but rather always on the cold calculus of total war.